


love me like you hate me, hate me like you love me

by lvdym



Category: Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Gen, I AM SORRY, Other, i really need to work on like not turning everything i write into a monologue im sorry, look i feel aro and didyme must have been kinda similar and stuff, so this is just a very action deficient rendition on her death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-31
Updated: 2018-07-31
Packaged: 2019-06-19 15:58:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15513354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lvdym/pseuds/lvdym
Summary: Didyme, the ephemeral thing. Why would this last?





	love me like you hate me, hate me like you love me

**Author's Note:**

> It's been a while, huh? I've been trying to finish this since December, and I finally have. I have so many half finished things it's a mess and one day I will be able to finish things. It's still not very long, but we'll slowly work our way up to the very long fics I have vaguely planned.  
> The title is taken from the song Black Star by Queen of Hearts.

Didyme longs for many things. The only-just woman, longing to be more. Her wishes come to her like a fluttered sigh: gentle touches, adoration, significance beyond usefulness. They are treacherous, butterfly wings burnt at the edges. She wants love, and life, and to feel more tangible than she does. A scrap of silk, sunflower yellow, lost in the wind. Had she always been made of smoke and lies? She wishes she felt more like Marcus’ freedom, less like his shackles: he was a man of diplomacy, not of war, not of conquest. When she looks at him, she sees not husband but prisoner. Happiness wove into his being, and he was trapped. It feels like self-sacrifice when she suggests leaving, and the taste of betrayal is thick in the back of her throat. She does not ask for brotherly forgiveness; she plays naivete but Didyme knows better. They are siblings, they are cut from the same cloth. Aro wants them laid, unfurled, before him. Didyme only wants them to never leave her. 

She was a recipe of her past: two cups of abandonment, a half cup of regret, a dash of idealism, a heap of rejection. When she whispers her plans to Marcus, lit by flickers and hopes just as much as candlelight, she does not know what to expect. Maybe horror, indecisiveness. She does not expect him to meet her gaze, and for him to say in the most sure voice she’s ever heard from him: “I will follow you anywhere.” It feels like victory, and she feels like a traitor for holding it between her fists as if it were laurels. Consequences are not her forte; Didyme does not think in what-ifs and contingencies. She takes this seed of champion, and whispers to it in the hopes it will grow, words with the weight of water. She does not dare to think about Marcus agreeing to make her happy, she does not think about him being her prisoner now and not Aro’s. Transference of custody sounds too much like something Caius would enjoy for her to name it worth her time.

Didyme overlooks much, the learned behaviour of an afterthought. She does not consider how heavily this might sting Caius, or how it might throw Athenodora into chaos, or how the bitterness would taste in Sulpicia’s mouth, or that it might break her brother’s heart. She fictionalises a fairy-tale life for herself, where kindness and happiness means nothing bad can ever happen to you, and believes it so heavily she convinces herself it is true. She does not mull over that she is not kind, nor happy. 

She lays amongst silk and velvet, stretched, reclining, convinced of her own invincibility. She does not feel like a child’s innocence, nor a snowflake caught on an eyelash, nor a warm summer’s day. She does not feel like there’s only so long she can last. She feels as though she may be a general, or a politician, or an empress; anything that would give rise to the epithet of ‘the Great’. 

Didyme is soft and feather light, and she does not expect betrayal in return for her own betrayal. When Aro enters the room, a maelstrom eternal, she smiles at him as she thinks about eating sunshine. 

“Brother!” She greets, her voice as sweet as oozing honey. She feels sedated with satisfaction, thick and viscous and certain of her own impending freedom. 

“Sister,” Aro replies, with a flat voice. The dullness strikes a note of fear in Didyme: this is not who her brother is. 

Didyme looks to him, and wonders. What was wrong? What has happened to the affable brother who speaks of loyalty and family and conquering? Where has this man come from, and where was the one she knew? Didyme feels the damning question before she thinks it: had she ever really known her own blood?

“I’m sorry,” Aro says, his voice a composite of genuine sorrow smothered by careful calculation. Didyme does not expect the apology, and she anticipates him lunging himself at her even less. It is a blur; blinding pain, with a cacophony of shredding metal, and a waterfall of contrition. She thinks she understands, as he takes her left arm and pulls. If Aro had tried to leave her, she cannot say her course of action would be any less violent, any less ruthless. 

With her last moment of awareness, she does think of Marcus. She thinks of her husband, and his gentleness, and how if anyone deserved to be betrayed from all sides, it would be anyone but him. Her last thoughts are of the man who clutched her like a drowning man and called it love, and then: nothing, nothing, nothing.


End file.
